'Mad Men' Season 7 premiere: Elisabeth Moss is 'starting to feel weird' about the series end

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The long goodbye for “Mad Men” is about to begin, as Elisabeth Moss knows well.

The much-honored AMC drama about 1960s ad executives starts its seventh and final season — which will be split into two chunks — Sunday (April 13), with the last episodes slated to be shown next year. Moss has had one of the biggest character arcs in creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner’s series as secretary-turned-advertising prodigy Peggy Olson, and she’s feeling the pinch of the show coming to a close.

“Matt and I were texting about how it’s definitely starting to feel weird,” Moss tells Zap2it. “I’m starting to feel that boulder in my chest, and we both agreed that it’s a lot harder than we thought it was going to be. At the beginning of this [season], we thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got 14 episodes. We’ve got so much time.’ Then suddenly, you’re down to seven episodes left and it’s like, ‘That’s not a lot.'”

Moss anticipates not playing Peggy as a “gaping hole. It’s almost going to feel like a career change. I’ve had all these years on this show. I think it’ll feel like starting over again.”

A recent Golden Globe Award winner for last year’s Sundance Channel miniseries “Top of the Lake,” Moss had a previous series run as presidential daughter Zoey Bartlet on “The West Wing.” She appreciates how fortunate she’s been in her television work thus far.

“‘Privileged’ is definitely the word I would use,” she says. “Being on ‘The West Wing’ was already cool enough for me, something I felt lucky to get to do and proud of. It was one of the first shows in what some people call this ‘golden age’ of television, with such incredibly intelligent writing.

“I didn’t see ‘Mad Men’ coming,” adds Moss. “There wasn’t this TV renaissance that there is now, so I’m lucky to have been part of the dawn of it.”